Merit

Merit (功德) is the mirror of Karma. Karma is the weight of blood on your ledger; Merit is the weight of good done. You earn it by teaching a disciple, serving your sect, preaching a Dao Sermon, sharing tea, playing a game of Weiqi, and sparing a fleeing soul. It climbs toward a ceiling of 3000, it never decays, and crossing certain thresholds permanently teaches you one of six arts that can be learned no other way.

Merit is switched on by default (Merit-Enabled). It is independent of your Path and your Yin-Yang balance: nothing you do to earn it moves either one. A heavy Karma ledger or a Devil Path lean slows how fast you earn it, but never to zero.

Seeing Your Merit

/cultivation merit opens the Merit page. It is also one click away from the Dao page (/cultivation dao), next to your Karma readout, where a Merit (功德) row links to it.

The page shows:

• your current rank and your Merit as current / max;
• your lifetime total, which only ever goes up;
• your current gain rate - the percentage of a deed's base Merit you are actually being credited right now, with a note when Karma or a Devil Path lean is holding it down;
• the six Merit arts in threshold order, each marked Known, Ready to learn or Locked.

Merit belongs to your account, not to one profile. Nothing in the mod resets it - not Reincarnation, not Ascension, not a Lifespan Mortal Passing.

Earning Merit

Every source below pays a base amount. What you are actually credited is that base run through the gates in the next section.

Merit earned this way also feeds Faction standing: Azure Dawn Sect pays 0.2 standing per point of Merit actually credited.

What decides how much you are credited

Each deed passes through these checks in order. A deed that fails one of the first three pays nothing and tells you why.

• One-time deeds (teaching, tea, Weiqi) are recorded against the other person, so the same pairing never pays twice.
• The pair cooldown. A repeatable deed with a person on the receiving end (Merciful Hand, sparing a soul) pays that person once per Merit-Same-Beneficiary-Cooldown-Seconds (1800, thirty minutes). Sect deeds and sermons have nobody on the receiving end, so this does not apply to them.
• The realm gap. Teaching and Merciful Hand only count when you out-rank the other person by Merit-Min-Realm-Gap (1) realms. Sparing a soul and sect deeds are not gated this way, because the other person is usually your equal.
• Karma and Path. The base is multiplied by (1 - Karma fraction x 0.6) x Path factor, where the Path factor is 0.75 on the Devil Path, 1.1 on the Righteous Path and 1.0 otherwise, and the result never drops below 0.25. At full Karma and no Path, you are credited 40% of the base. When the multiplier is below 100% you are told so after each deed.
• Your ceiling. Karma also lowers how high you can bank: the ceiling is Merit-Max x (1 - Karma fraction x 0.3), so a cultivator at full Karma stops at 2100 until the ledger is cleared.
• The daily cap. No more than Merit-Daily-Cap (300) Merit from deeds in a 24-hour window. Hitting the ceiling or the cap says your Merit is at its current ceiling and credits nothing.

A test profile earns no real Merit: the deed is refused and consumes none of its one-time records.

Losing Merit

In ordinary play, you cannot. Merit does not decay (unlike Karma), killing does not subtract from it, and a Karma ledger only slows and caps what you earn - it never takes back what you already hold.

The only way to lower it is an admin's negative /cultivation merit grant, which floors at 0. Your lifetime total stays where it was, and an art you have already learned is not taken back.

The Six Ranks

Your rank is the highest threshold you have reached. Reaching a new one tells you so in chat. The thresholds are fixed in the mod; only the ceiling is configurable.

The Six Merit Arts

The moment your Merit crosses a threshold, you are taught the art for it outright. A save that crossed a threshold while you were away, or a server that switched Merit on later, catches up when you log in.

Merit arts are Merit-only: no manual, no flash of enlightenment, no breakthrough gift and no sect inscription will ever teach one. They sit alongside your other techniques, so you cast them the same way - and each still needs the realm shown below to be performed.

These are the shipped defaults; like every technique they can be retuned in the Arts config, and their strength grows with technique mastery. Where an art picks a target, it takes the nearest player who is at least Merit-Min-Realm-Gap realms below you, with no check on sect or friendship.

• Guiding Lantern. Marks the nearest eligible player within 12 blocks. For 5 minutes they gain 20% more Qi from every source. With no one in range, the cast is refunded.
• Merciful Hand. Heals the nearest eligible player within 8 blocks, but only one who is below 60% of their maximum health (Merit-Heal-Target-Health-Percent). The heal is 30 plus 8 for every realm of gap between you. It also pays you the 15 Merit above, within the gates. If nobody qualifies, or the patient is healthy, the cast is refunded.
• Aegis of Boundless Compassion. A gathered art: you channel it for between 1 and 5 seconds at 6 Qi per second, and a full channel hits at 1.5 times power. On release it wards every other player within 10 blocks - friend or foe, in your sect or not - with 25% damage reduction (times the charge power) for 12 seconds. It never wards you.
• Bestow Virtuous Qi. Takes up to 50 Qi from you and gives it to the nearest eligible player within 10 blocks, who receives more than you spend. The bonus is 50%, raised by 10% of itself for each rank step you have climbed: 70% extra at Merit Complete, 75% at Golden Body of Merit. The recipient's own Qi-gain multipliers then apply.
• Karmic Absolution. Clears up to 40 of your own Karma per cast (Merit-Absolution-Karma-Cleared), with a ten-minute cooldown. With a clean ledger it does nothing. This is the one place Merit touches Karma, and it only ever lowers it.
• Body of Accumulated Merit. The capstone. It heals you for 80 plus 20 per rank step, and wards you with 20% damage reduction for 15 seconds plus 3 per rank step. At the rank it unlocks, that is a 180 heal and 30 seconds of protection, before mastery.

For Server Owners

Every value on this page lives in mods/Siren_Cultivation/Society/MeritConfig.json; the full file is on the Society config page.

Other Merit sources are tuned where they live: Soul-Spare-Merit in the Soul Escape config, the Tea-Merit-* and Weiqi-Merit-* keys on the Tea Ceremony and Weiqi pages, and the Sermon-Merit-* keys on the Dao Sermon page.

Add-ons can read and credit Merit through the Public API (getMerit, addMerit) and react to it with the pre-gain, gain and rank-up events - see the API events.

Related: Karma, Dao, Techniques, Commands, Permissions.